5 Questions About Semantic&nbspSEO

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Earlier this month, I attended the SemTechBiz2013 conference in San Francisco. This is a gathering of creators and designers of the semantic tech stack, folks who work on semantic web standards, and representatives from the search engines, all coming together to discuss the state of the industry. There was a focus on semantic search and structured data markup at the show, reflecting the expansion of schema.org and Google Knowledge Graph as well as Bing Snapshots and the growing influence of the Open Graph Protocol.

Marketers have a laundry list of activities to choose from to increase visibility, build brand, and drive engagement. It can be tough to quantify when to work on the hot new thing, especially when the words "Google" and "SEO" are prominently involved. When there are fundamental shifts in the SEO landscape (and I believe we're near the beginning of one of these shifts), search industry practitioners are often asked how to organize a strategy around the new tactical options. Here are five questions that I hope clarify the current state of semantic SEO and structured data markup:

1. Is "Semantic SEO" a new term?

We spend a lot of time in the SEO community debating terms and definitions, even when they are established activities we've been doing for years. This is doubly true for folks in tech who are not in the search industry. If you have an abundance of free time, you can jump into any Hacker News thread related to SEO and see there's still no agreement on whether or not SEO is a valid term or discipline.

The optimization part aside, in Aaron's SemTech piece I referenced above there is a concise definition of semantic search provided by Tamas Doszkocs of WebLib:

"Semantic search is a search or a question or an action that produces meaningful results, even when the retrieved items contain none of the query terms, or the search involves no query text at all."

That's a great starting point to think about how Google and Bing are shifting towards semantic search results. Justin Briggs wrote a piece about entity search results that's over a year old, and it's still a useful primer on how search engines are increasingly moving towards these kinds of results for user queries. However, there's still not an agreed-upon term to describe the activities around achieving visibility in the semantic search results or optimizing for a semantic search engine.

I've heard everything from "entity-based SEO" to "entity SEO" to "Search Entity Optimization" as descriptors for optimizing around entity-based results. I'd personally lean towards "semantic search optimization" or "semantic SEO," but I can guarantee one thing: It doesn't matter what you call it at the end of the day. Adjusting to the semantic search landscape will be part of the SEO's job description going forward.

2. What do "entity-based search results" look like now?

The first wave of entity-based results in Google have been through "answer cards" and Knowledge Graph results. We're used to frequently seeing Google searches for people, places, and media object results that look like this:

It's obvious that Google's Knowledge Graph result above is generated primarily from the Freebase entry on Sam Peckinpah. The shift that will be much harder to deconstruct will be search results ranking sites that aren't clearly optimizing for specific keyword queries, or may not contain what SEOs would consider strong link profiles with exact- or partial-match anchor text. Consider this result for the classic phrase from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey:

The YouTube clips and other search results on the first page all contain what you might expect to see in terms of on-page optimization and anchor text profiles: keyword usage in the title/META tags/URL, and a mix of exact- and partial-match anchor text in the link profiles. But the IMDb and Wikiquote pages are a bit different, and don't contain strong signals in either of those areas. There are quite a few links to the IMDb page, but relatively little in the way of partial- or exact-match anchor text that an SEO might be expect to see. Additionally, while the phrase is found in the body content of the page, the usual SEO sweet spots in the URL, internal anchor text, and HTML title tag aren't optimized for the quote.

Gianluca Fiorelli recently wrote a piece on graphs and entity recognition, which addressed this topic and how it it may relate to co-occurrence and co-reference across web documents. Google released the Wikilinks Corpus this year, and in the release they describe a system of co-reference to add in entity resolution. Specifically, when are different mentions or queries referencing the same entity across web documents?

The Google/UMass Wikilinks project provides a good illustration of cross-document co-reference with two web documents that both link to the disambiguated entity 'Banksy' on Wikipedia:

Or in my previous example above, when people are searching for "I'm sorry Dave," Google can fairly easily match that query to the entity 2001: A Space Odyssey across web documents that co-reference the IMDb page, and return results for that entity without relying on keyword string matches in HTML tags and anchor text.

3. So is the keyword dead?

Interestingly enough, I've read two pieces from very sharp SEOs who have a different take on that. AJ Kohn makes a compelling case that keywords still matter as they are crucial in determining user intent and matching that to relevant results. While entity-based SEO and Knowledge Graph results attempt to guess user intent through localization, personalization, and entity disambiguation, there's nothing more clear in terms of intent than a keyword string of "hospitals in Seattle" or "What's the best Xbox 360 game?" (Obviously it's Bioshock.)

But there are a couple of signs that the keyword may be fading a bit as the ultimate arbiter of user intent. Consider the launch of Google's "conversational search," which layers what you've searched for, who you are, and where you are as intent modifiers to your query. Even stubborn old SEOs are coming to realize that there are layers of implicit intent in search results that we can't possibly unravel through keyword research or link graph metrics.

Mr. Bradley makes a very salient point in his SemTechBiz writeup (seriously, read that): Mobile is the driving force behind the semantic search revolution. Google, Bing, and Yahoo all see the writing on the wall with mobile adoption and the slow death of the desktop PC. Keywords may never die, but they're going to have a lot of company when it comes to determining user intent and serving relevant search results.

4. Is structured data markup a ranking factor?

Wouldn't we love to know? Not to be rude and answer my question with a question, but when was the last time Google actually confirmed something is a factor in their ranking algorithm? My memory says it was the site speed announcement in 2010. Readers should feel free to correct me in the comments if there is a more recent example.

As a simplified mental model, you could group the search engine ranking factors into one of these categories:

Popularity signals: Links, and the quality and quantity thereof in particular. Other visibility signals such as social media sharing would fall into this category.

Relevancy signals: There's a whole lot that goes into this one, but a good reference point is the Google patent on phrase-based indexing.

Things that dramatically affect user experience on a site: Hacked sites at the extreme, and smaller factors like site speed or reading level at the other end of the spectrum.

Things that actually appear in the search engine results: Keywords in HTML titles, URLs, and META description tags (yes, they affect CTR at a minimum).

Structured data markup significantly affects both the way relevancy signals have traditionally been generated in the keyword-string SEO world, as well as how search results actually appear. The SERP landscape is a long way from ten blue links; video and image thumbnails, authorship thumbnails, and rich snippets of many types now fundamentally alter what users click on:

It will be interesting to see what testing data and correlation studies tell us about structured data markup as a ranking factor. If Google and Bing can derive a clean signal from the presence of this markup, it certainly meets other criteria we've typically used to mark something as a ranking factor. Here at Moz, we'll soon be publishing ongoing updates to the 2011 Search Engine Ranking Factors study. It should be interesting to once again see any changes in correlation data as well as the latest SEO survey results.

There have been a number of SEOs who raise valid concerns about the implementation of structured data markup. Will it enable scraper sites to easily take your data and use it to outrank you? Or worse, will Google vacuum up your data for its own purposes in Knowledge Graph results or increasingly sophisticated rich snippets? This tweet from Dennis Goedegebuure concisely sums up the latter concern, and it applies to Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter or any other search engine or social media network:

For many practitioners in the SEO industry, it feels like we may have seen this movie before. Let's say, for example, that you spent considerable time and money optimizing images with an eye on increasing your visibility in Google image search. The recent UI change to Google image search results likely had a significant negative ROI impact on that effort. There's a very sound takeaway in that Define Media Group post: It's still a good idea to adhere to SEO best practices for image search optimization, but it likely changes how heavily you'd opt to prioritize that work versus an activity that will yield more traffic or visibility. The same ROI calculation should be applied to structured data markup, whether it's schema.org, Open Graph Protocol, or Twitter Cards markup.

The vast majority of the rich snippets and Knowledge Graph elements in the search results are derived from Freebase and a small handful of other semantic data sources, such as the CIA World Factbook and MusicBrainz. Whether or not we choose to mark up our sites will have little effect on the current Google or Bing SERPs.

However, there's a massive amount of data still present in good old HTML, and the search engines are keen to use structured data to display that information. You can see the limitations of document retrieval and reliance on the link graph in any number of less-than-desirable search results. I believe Google and Bing will raise the bar on the quality of search results through the wider adoption of semantic data markup.

I also believe we should consistently hold them and any other structured data consumers accountable for making sure proper attribution and responsible user interface design are key parts of their structured data consumption. SEO has received a bad rap in some circles as simply being a vehicle for spam. The reality is that SEO heavy-lifting is behind many of the better search results you'll find. Going forward, the same guideline will apply to structured data.

A healthy web ecosystem will find a balance between search engine, user, and content publisher. Let's continue to remind the aggregators of our data of that as we continue down the semantic SEO path.

Bonus question: What's the best move for web publishers?

The rate of adoption of structured data markup will have profound effects on what our SERPs look like in the next few years. Is it worth the effort for web publishers (both small and large) to immediately provide this markup? I'd love to hear your thoughts and strategy in the comments.

Is the CONTENT about where I am - What I do - and how I do it --- and how customers can use it - get it or find it?

Then --- and only then - should you worry about keywords, semantics, etc.

Write a good website people --- for god's sake - Content is king... Anything else --- is tricks... Tricks change.. cheats die... just make a good website with content and images... WRITE YOUR SITE for YOUR customers.

That's been the refrain from those that don't understand SEO, a refrain for 15 years now. You need to realize your audience is also a BOT, not just people. Google Bot has a special MACHINE way of deciding what is "good." Good is a dumb idea. It's subjective. So make it good for good for GOOG AND your audience.

Just tackling #3. Keywords do still matter. They logically can never, ever die. Now, people may argue exact match, variations of, used in context, etc. but if you align your website and its content with what the user wants to see (optimizing for the user - not Google), users will want to see your site as a result, which is EXACTLY what Google is trying to replicate. Providing users with the best possible result for their searchers. That is how intent is paired with the result. The keyword.

The fun part is now it has some accessories. It was stated in this post "but they're going to have a lot of company when it comes to determining user intent and serving relevant search results." and I think that also is a great thing. Again, you want the user to be on your site for all the right reasons, right? Kudos to a good post.

Thanks Ryan. I agree that there's no stronger signal of user intent than the keyword. It will be interesting to see how we adjust strategies to these changing intent signals. In some ways, we already have (focusing on Authorship, using data markup to indicate semantic relationships).

Its important that all the webmasters start applying schema.org where ever necessary on the site. The more and more structured data sites can have, it will help Google give the results right on the search result page with its knowledge graph or their search result cards. Google just wants webmasters to add more and more structured data which their algorithms can easily understand and interpret.

I think you'd be crazy to think that entity based search isn't an important part of SEO now and in the future. Clearly Google is moving towards things and not strings. But that doesn't mean that keywords aren't important.

In my mind, they are complementary, if not intertwined.

For instance, one of the ways in which entities are determined is through the labeling exercise referenced. What if instead of linking on Banksy they linked on 'the artist' or 'artist for the pseudo intellectual'? Google might still figure out the entity through other means but it would be more difficult.

User-centric language (aka keywords) makes it easier for search engines to identify and determine entities. Taken further, structured mark-up is easier for search engines to understand and use because it's in their 'language'.

The philosophy is really the same. Taking a page from Steve Krug, don't make Googlebot think.

My goal with my Keywords Still Matter post was to urge people not to disregard keywords but to use them in conjunction with new techniques such as structured mark-up. It's using them together that will give you the best results. In short, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Because we still can't really search for the crazy symbol Prince used as his name and instead searched for 'the artist formerly known as Prince'. Nor are we able to integrate all of the non-verbal gestures that make up the majority of communication.

Yep, the Banksy example (plus the entire Wikilinks project) is trying to tackle a core problem: entity disambiguation. This is really hard stuff to get right across a vast sea of HTML documents. Right now, it seems there's a handful of sites they trust with these co-reference signals (IMDB and Wikipedia being two of them.

Maybe a more accurate question would've been "Do keywords have new friends?"

I get that entity is a huge factor in search, but it seems to play all to well for spammers that have made themselves appear to be a "keyword rich entity". And for slower moving industries, or spammers that will not be implementing schema markup, their "keyword rich entity" may last a long while.

I feel that the keyword pendulum is in full swing, yet to settle, complicated even more by entity, location, and personalization.

To your bonus question, the effectiveness of schema will be determined by the use and abuse of it. Google and Bing already opt to ignore markup if it is not relevant, or not trusted.

Actually Google, as told me personally by John Mueller, simply doesn't care of showing any structured data rich snippet if there's a over-abundance of it in a document.

That is, somehow, also a way to prevent some sort of mega rich snippets we have seen, for instance, in relation with authorship, especially in the beginning. And a call to pay attention to use just those structured data that matters both for the users and Google.

Duane Forrester alluded to not trusting the schema, it seems that too much schema would be a poor trust signal. Using different formats for markup also seemed to be an issue with google trusting the markup. And a markup error on a page will negate all markup.

I think we're moving towards the context of a topic. So targeting only exact match keywords isn't going to help the user experience. We're moving to phrase based index of terms that make up what the "blue widget" keyword is about. So implementing this into rich snippet will help the users.

Fantastic post, Matt! I definitely agree that adjusting to and embracing semantic SEO is a new part of our roles as search-focused marketers. I'm excited to see what kinds of results/data people bring to the table regarding semantic markup and structured data being used as a ranking factor. I sort of like to think of it this way, every piece of text on a result that isn't plain black gets treated as a ranking factor to some extent (title, URL); why not the structured snippet, too? I'm simplifying, but I think there's some validity there.

To add my thoughts on your last question, I'm saying "yes"! I think it makes a whole lot of sense for small and large web publishers to use semantic markup. I mean, if nothing else you're getting some seriously hot search results. If things end up where I think a number of us suspect they're heading, web publishers could also get a significant benefit when engines enhance how they utilize, analyze, and reward structured data on those sites.

Thanks for the wonderful insights about Semantic Search! I am advocating semantic search and its implementations since Googe/Yahoo came into the support of Schema. I guess Semantic Markup can only help Google and other Search Engines to collect the information in a structured manner. Recent developments like Knowledge Graph, Carousal List , Rich Snippets are the example for the same. When it comes to people exploiting semantic data, yes, people are exploiting it and we have accept the fact that there will be a majority which will do all black hat stuff, so does the manipulative link building was, but Google dealt with such artificial link building very effectively in recent past. Google already started this as posted in this blog:http://www.seroundtable.com/less-google-rich-snippet-15216.html

I guess Semantic Search/Data is not the only thing which matters in ranking of a web page, a spam/low quality page wont be able to rank just because it has semantic data attached.

Personally, I am implementing Schema across all e-commerce sites and a number of service based sites (and a few blogs) - I can't see it doing any harm and I can see the good it will do especially for e-com sites.

I am yet to see a correlation between ranking and microformats, but I am seeing (where they appear in search) a rise in click-thru's - which for lots of businesses where page 1 is a harsh master, could potentially be worth more than ranking no1 below adwords. Just like authorship pics showing up has shown an increase in clicks.

Interesting notion that the semantic markup would pose an increase on CTR. Do you feel it's due to the data being more specified and closer to the search query? I've been reluctant to implement the schema tags, however for more exposure and traffic, it may be worth the time invested!

The CTR increase has proven itself out over a number of structured data projects I've worked on, but not all of them are winners. In many cases, the work involved is justified by the increased traffic. If semantic markup is or becomes a ranking factor, that changes the ROI considerably.

About Structured Data as a ranking factor... sincerely I don't know if it is or if it exists a correlation (and what grade of correlation) between them and rankings.

What I see is that exists a very strong relation between Structured Data, meant as a Knowledge Base source, and presence in the Knowledge Graph box.

Relation that must be paired also by other factors, such that your structured data page is ranking already in the first page.

For instance. If you do a search for an artist (let's say Bruce Springsteen or Michael Nyman), Knowledge Graph is showing you also the next concert scheduled. Those data are not picked up from Open Data sources (i.e.: Wikipedia or Freebase), but from the structured data of the site ranking in the first page for the "Michael Nyman concert in [name of place of concert]".

If you click on the venue of the event, in fact, Google is opening a new SERP, which corresponds to the "Michael Nyman concert in [name of place of concert]". Within the first result you will find the site with the Event rich snippet from where Google picked up the data for the KG Box.

The same happen with the images thumbnails in the KG Box. If you have not marked up the photo at least with the Open Graph Protocol, your image probably won't be shown, even though that same photo is ranking well in the Images Search.

Very true. What Google populates from Freebase in the Knowledge Graph is sprinkled with structured data that it accumulates from its crawl. Data that it can identify as semantically related to the entity in the SERP. It's that last piece that SEO are going to need to puzzle on.

Many thanks for your kind words Matthew, and for posing such interesting and useful questions about this topic.

I smile in regard to the question about the death of the keyword, as my use of the "keyword is dead" meme was deliberately polemic.

AJ, you're quite right in all your central points about the value of keywords. The bulk of searches still start with a keyword-based query, and so understanding how users construct those queries is critical to understanding the query intent - not to mention being able (at least in ecommerce environments) to assign a dollar value to different keywords, and so to specifically target high-value keywords.

Still, I'm happy that people are now recognizing that the relationship between keywords and entities ("strings and things") is a synergistic one, and that "search engine optimization" and "keyword optimization" are related but no longer equivalent pursuits.

I think this is very pertinent to how one approaches "content strategy," which is certainly all the rage in digital marketing circles these days. Content doesn't necessarily need to be keyword-rich in order to gain substantial traction in the search engines, whereas content that's keyword-rich for the sake of being keyword-rich is more often than not dross.

I think that looking at content through the lens of semantic search can aid content strategists in organizing and encoding data ("content") in ways that the search engines can better understand and digest it - ultimately to the benefit to the human consumers of these data (and even in the absence of search considerations, a semantic outlook can help inform information architecture and user experience design). Put another way, "semantic SEO" can help get the biggest bang for your content development buck.

As to the question as to whether or not structured data markup is a ranking factor, I think a strong case can be made for the answer "absolutely, but not directly."

That case is based on simple logic: IF by virtue of structured data markup a search engine is able to better understand the topicality of a given web resource AND if a search engine attempts to return relevant results based in part on their topical understanding of web resources THEN a resource that a search engine understands better by dint of structured data will perform better for topically relevant queries.

All of which is not to say - and as the search engines rightfully point out - that structured data use is a ranking factor. The absence or presence of structured data is not in itself a sufficient condition to improve ranking position, any more than the absence or presence of a title tag will influence rankings. But structured data that does improve a search engine's understanding of a resource seems likely to influence rankings, just as a title tag that provides a search engine with information about the topicality of a web page certainly does influence rankings.

It's possible, of course, that Google says: "great, some structured data - I'm going to use that in order to generate a rich snippet, but I'm going to otherwise ignore what I've learned about this resource from this structured data." Possible but, I think, not very plausible. And this is at least anecdotally borne out by the resources displayed in the SERPs on click-throughs from events listed in Google's Knowledge Graph, which tend to be pages that include structured data about that specific event.

Finally, in regard to structured data actually harming publishers, and what their best way forward should be, I think it's useful to think of these questions from the reverse angle. That is, what are the relative benefits and possible pitfalls of withholding structured data from the search engines?

The benefit may be avoiding putting time and resources into something that doesn't result in a bottom-line improvement. The pitfall, of course, is that not doing something is rarely a growth strategy: avoiding a negative ROI isn't in itself much of a triumph.

So I think that, from an SEO perspective, publishers should look at how to employ semantic technologies - including structured data markup - in ways that benefit them. And while that route may often be direct, as in the case of generating rich snippets, it can also be indirect, as in the case of using those same technologies to construct websites that better declare, expose and interconnect the entities that at the heart of the search engine's semantic interests.

This is where we have been headed with semantic search. We are dealing with a massive database where keywords (phrases) are descriptors of the ultimate entities - people, places, concepts. Search engines are not only looking at single search sessions. They look at what one has searched before and how those searches may relate to the latest query. They want to understand the underlying meaning behind the query. Keywords alone do not reflect such.

You mentioned Freebase, and I think of the graph on this page: https://developers.google.com/freebase/v1/getting-started It displays nodes that show how "keyword search results" are part of "topic summary" and "structured result set" - a visual that may help marketers envision data structure.

I vote "yes" to publishers using markup, depending upon what other priorities that need to be addressed first.

Great post, Matthew! As a user, I'm very excited for semantic search, e.g., the Space Odyssey example is amazing; it gets you much closer to what you were actually looking for.

With regards to whether or not "keywords are dead"; I don't think so. Matching search queries verbatim may not be as helpful, but some sense of the search query I think will always be relevant. At least until we're able to search using something other than language (smell? memory?); that's certainly the search engine of the far off future. ;-)

Matt Cutts mentions that Google's philosophy "has been moving away from keywords; from strings towards things". I wonder how much more obvious can it get? On the searcher's side, the keyword remains important because it's what the searcher will always use in the search box. On the marketer side, Matt's statement spells the end of the keyword as a mechanism to directly influence the relevance of a resource to the searcher's query term--Google's developing (developed) more advanced ways of determining relevance now, like semantics, authorship, and social signals.

Schema.org markup is a double edged sword. Two simple examples in which their are pros and cons...

1. Listing events on your website and utilizing schema.org events has the potential for the website owner to lose visits since the important info is presented in the SERPs.

2. For recipes, I think it's hard for Google to display an entire recipe in their SERPs which means a user will still visit your website. In that scenario it's good to use schema markup in the hopes it will increase click-through rates from the SERPs.

As far as ranking factors admitted by Google. The most recent example I can think of is smartphone search results. From Google:

"we plan to roll out several ranking changes in the near future that address sites that are misconfigured for smartphone users"

Good call on that smartphone update. I think, in general, Google is going to reveal little in the way of confirmations about ranking factors. When they do, it will probably be under the umbrella of 'this helps users on your site' like the smartphone rankings piece.

IMO, there's a better shot of a click to an event marked up in schema.org than there is say, a basic fact. The Knowledge Graph and answer cards are going to take away a lot of clicks for sure. There's a good chance that users who see an event in a rich snippet or Knowledge Graph listing may be looking for more info about the event or how to buy tickets. Those clicks will be sought after.

When it comes to KGraph, a wise SEO should need to look to those SERPs Google links to in the Box... and rank there the best it can (and in many cases, that is possible)... second/deriverats clicks will surely increase.

The old practices of link building with anchor text is coming to an end. Everyday it has less effect in the search results as every SEO Professional can see with their clients.

But wait, what will replace this factor?. We can think of social signals, link age, etc., but for me, it is all about Semantic Search. The important factor here is: Relevance!.

For example, if you search for “where is the nearest Wal-Mart?” Google might know where I am and help me find the nearest supermarket store for me. But what is really important, is to know why I need a Wal-Mart, it is because I want to buy fast-food, or because I need a new lawn mower or may be I am looking for a DVD Movie for this weekend?.

Its been an year that you have posted this blog and after that penguin 4.1 and hummingbird updated has been released. After the update Its been clearly seen that adding semantic markup on site does help in ranking apart from showing rich snippet and other benefits.

I have recently researched on the same and collected all information that a beginner SEO guy look for which I used to create an info-graphic that contains what, why, where and how to implement semantic markup on a website

Of course, semantic SEO is a term to think about at this time, because of the incidents of simple body text in Google serp. In Seogarden.net we are evaluating the way of the co-occurrencies to improve our ranking results. But we are at the starting point.

Great post, you're probably familiar with the seoskpetic.com blog, he talks frequently about semanticweb technologies that fuel the query results we see today. Not trying to hijack, but I just read a great post, re key takeaways from the Semantic Technology and Business Conference, on his blog. I have to recommend it as natural next step for those wanting a deeper dive, following this post.

Great post! Semantic SEO is live and yes markup with display none in drop down menues is hiding text from the viewer and is often used by black hat seos to dump tons of keywords. So Google is getting better in rewarding quality content sites with white hat seo.

Really cool article but I'm bit confused regarding structured data and use of schema.org, as you have mentioned that it doesn't give any special benefit to ranking and might hurt in future. Is it really so?

Actually, there is one of my client who is asking to put the structured data with reference of 1 of his friend's site who started doing well in the SERPs after using structured data, I'm trying to get more details on structured data use and it's benefits in rankings as well as in CTR. But after reading your post which says it might hurt in future, I'm bit more confused. what to do and what not? Can you throw some more light on use of structured data and consequences of using it? or is there any post which you or anyone else here can refer me to make an easy decision regarding structured data?

Semantic technology is the future of eDiscovery and search. As stated in the article, many tools are being built on the concept of natural language processing and understanding to make discovery more meaningful by semantically enriching content.

As per my concern i agreed with all the 5 points but its not easy to ignore the Keywords and keywords are not dead yet but yes some SEO Strategies are dead now specially the one which was responsible to work around some specific keywords.

Aside from that, for agencies, how do we explain semantic SEO and the shift towards uniquely valuable content to clients who still want to see a list of keyword rankings, is that still something that we should be providing to them with all the changes going on, is that still valuable information? What are your thought? We have a big debate going in our office about this now.

Good stuff. I think the challenge is using traditional "keyword metrics" with new topic and semantic metrics. You've done a great job addressing the two. Being a good WRITER is the key skill for content creators. Researching more logical sides of page creation-- like metrics to find topics from data analysis-- that's more an SEO skill. Tools like Market Muse bridge the gap by doing the complex topic and semantic research on the back-end. I also think people should spend time comparing the "related keywords" from similar high ranking webpages to see how often they appear. Traditional keyword research tools let us do this.

very nice article.. i've seen here in Moz, as well as somewhere else in the web, that semantic was crucial even years ago, starting 2005 or earlier.. thats great to know, as in italian market i see SEOs talking about semantic seo and semantic web only recently, apparently.. nice points for a new article i'd like to write about one of those days

I read your bonus question too quickly and thought it said "What is the best movie for web publishers?" Great piece. Still getting my head around it. Maybe if I re-read it a little slower, it might ink in :)

Great post Mathew - I've found myself asking more questions though. It's inevitable that semantic search is coming, and for me the really interesting thing is the effect this will have on keywords. I totally agree with kchandler, I don't think these will die, but rather we will have to think more cleverly with how we use them. Keyword clusters around a theme seems to be the logically answer at the moment, but it's still unclear. You've inspired me to do more digging on the topic. Cheers.

I am giving a conference next month and I was planning on introducing the concepto of a "semantic communications plan". I manage lots of digital marketing campaigns and I notice that a communication plan is created but not the sematics related to the content that will be produced. And even worse, the semantics used in different areas such as SEO (content marketing), Adwords, Social Media is arbitrary based on the person caring out the task. Consistent semantics in digital campaigns seems like it would benefit SEO if it is based on demand (google's using those keywords)...what are your thoughts on this?

I love semantic search and just wrote a blog post about this the other day. I am number one for the term "AZ SEO Expert", but the word "expert" isn't in my URL, page description or title. And none of the three terms AZ + SEO + Expert are in my URL. I love this search feature!

I think keywords research and keyword targeting are always going to be one of the important tactics in ranking for search engines. The change is how we use the targeting and research. Rather than keyword stuffing the same exact keyword (maybe even a plural) all over one page is dead. However, defining a theme of a variety of keywords and using them comfortably through out a page is the way to go.

I love this topic. I wrote a post about how I was testing schema.org on a site with little to no links. Checking in WMT, there was virtually ZERO traffic or impressions (same with GA). Within 24 of WMT discovering the semantic markup, the site went from 0 impressions to 10K in a week.

Thanks for the informative article. I really enjoyed reading the supplemental stuff you had on Google patents and phase based indexing. In reality, the Internet is just an adolescent and think about how much you have changed since you were a teenager (I hope at least some).

To answer your question: I have begun to use the rich snippets and markups. My reasoning is that they make search results look better and display a more attractive listing for my sites. The goal is to have a high CTR and presenting easily readable and informative summaries in search results seems to do this for my websites. As for the future, I think we should all sit back, relax and adapt when needed.

Incredible how concepts can evolve and shake up a community. SEO's see this more often than not and this is another way to shift the industry, keep us on our toes and our clients even more confused than ever. Informative post and just more tidbits we need to be up to speed with on how the search engines are creating a better user experience. I'm off to learn more.

PS - Thanks for the plugs on the SemTechBiz article, Matthew. This is a great read to know more http://www.seoskeptic.com/key-search-marketing-takeaways-from-semtechbiz-2013/.

So much thought going into what Google is doing. Understandably so...but frankly the question shouldn't be about whether keywords are dead or dying, but is the traditional search engine dead or dying. I for one do not hit up Google for my searching these days as much as I used to...instead I turn to the social media sites. So...I guess the question I have is, how important will search engines, even Google, be in a couple years?

We have to optimize our website according to user point of view, informative and attractive content on site, website speed does matter a lot and if you ranked Top 10 position in Google by any tricks but you have not informative content for user, your CTR increase and lead graph fallen down.

find the right way ;) Mark up the main topic and relevant things so (I think) u can't spam than that much. Mark ups with "display:none;" will also be a bad idea I guess. If u mark a thing why you should hide it?

I think its unbelievable what google is able to read from a html-code-block. And thats a hard to solve thing...

Mark Ups are how our SERPs look - or have an influence to the look - so we have to take care...